BOOKS OF THE TIMES

By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Published: October 26, 1987

AND THE BAND PLAYED ON. Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. By Randy Shilts. 630 pages. St. Martin's Press. $24.95.

THE advance word on this huge reportorial history of acquired immune deficiency syndrome was that it had identified the man who first brought AIDS to the United States, one Gaetan Dugas, a sexually voracious French-Canadian airline steward known to have frequented homosexual bathhouses across the country.

This news seemed incredible - first, because it implied that some sort of order could be discerned in the tens of thousands who by now have been infected with the AIDS virus and the thousands who have died from it, and second, because it raised the question: If investigators knew enough to trace the disease to a single person, why couldn't they have done something about it?

Well, this last is exactly the point of Randy Shilts's ''And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic.'' Various individuals knew more about AIDS much earlier than most of us were aware, the author believes. For example: Through statistical studies and interviews, investigators with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta were able to establish that 40 of the first 200 American AIDS cases had either slept with Mr. Dugas, known as ''Patient Zero,'' or slept with someone who had slept with him.

Even medical people unaware of ''Patient Zero'' suspected almost from the start that AIDS was being transmitted through sexual contact, and that this had to involve some component of human body fluids that would require intensive laboratory investigation. And it was evident to many both outside and inside the gay community that promiscuous sexual behavior would have to be modified if the spread of the disease was going to be checked.

Yet, according to Mr. Shilts, strong countervailing forces conspired to allow the AIDS epidemic to take hold. Leaders of the blood-bank industry closed their eyes to the possibility that AIDS could be spread through transfusion. The search for the cause of AIDS was impeded by political squabbling among various agencies on the domestic front and even in the international arena, where, according to Mr. Shilts, a virologist at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., sought for reasons of self-glorification to obscure the discovery of the AIDS virus by researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

Exacerbating these and other problems was the Reagan Administration's behind-the-scenes refusal to provide adequate financing for AIDS research, despite repeated public insistence that the disease was its No. 1 health priority. What it all came down to, Mr. Shilts insists, was homophobia in both the Administration and the American press, an attitude whose premise was that so long as heterosexuals weren't involved, there was no real problem.

To complicate matters further, there were deep divisions in the gay community, a vocal part of which believed that behind any attempt to limit its sexual freedom or to impose mandatory blood testing lay a mentality that some members called fascist.

These tragic ironies and farcical contradictions are portrayed in all their complexity by Mr. Shilts - who since 1982 has been covering the AIDS epidemic for the San Francisco Chronicle and whose previous book was ''The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk.'' Beginning with New York City's celebration of America's Bicentennial, in 1976, when, it is suspected, the AIDS virus may first have landed on America's shores, he carries the story forward in a series of omniscient-voice journal entries up to the point where Rock Hudson's conspicuous death from AIDS finally concentrated the country's mind on the disease. It is a depressing and often heart-rending story that tries to portray the positive side of homosexual life along with the self-destructive. It is also a heroic work of journalism on what must rank as one of the foremost catastrophes of modern history.

One only wonders whether Mr. Shilts hasn't inadvertently provided fuel for those unsympathetic to the fight against AIDS, by reassuring them of their exemption from the epidemic. True, he implicitly deplores the ignorance of those who have identified AIDS as a homosexual disease, ''as if viruses had the intelligence to choose between inclinations of human behavior,'' as one bemused observer puts it.

But at the same time, his story demonstrates the relative lack of risk to those who aren't gay or hemophilic or drug-addicted, or who aren't the sexual partners or offspring of such people. Moreover, he doesn't attempt to explain or justify gay promiscuity, or to defend the social worth of the homosexual way of life. The case he makes for compassion is primarily humanitarian.

The tragic history he recites is bound to move open-minded people. But those who condemn homosexuality are not open-minded. As Mr. Shilts himself has demonstrated at length, such people believe that heterosexual monogamy is the only sexual state that a decent human being can inhabit, and that AIDS is God's scourge, the multibillion-dollar cost of it to society be damned. By reading ''And the Band Played On,'' such people are likely to be convinced that if the AIDS epidemic is allowed to run its course, homosexuals, drug addicts and the irresponsibly promiscuous will have disappeared from the face of the earth.

In the light of this, one can only hope for the best - that humaneness will prevail over social Darwinism, and that the majority of the people who read Mr. Shilts's tragic history will be moved by its implications to support a battle against AIDS that, if his sources are correct, may last well into the next century.